Books |
Grief
Andrew Holleran
By
Published: Jan 01, 2006
Category:
Fiction
In 1978, Andrew Holleran published his first novel, Dancer from the Dance. It was a breakthrough book, the first novel to get inside the male gay fascination with physical beauty and see it as more than sexual obsession. "The gay Gatsby," critics called it. Actually, it was more — without knowing it, Holleran was writing an elegy for a generation of gay men that would be wiped out in the ’80s by AIDS.
"Grief" is a novel about a survivor of that era. Most of the narrator’s friends are dead. He’s just spent twelve years doing not much more than visit his mother in a Florida nursing home, and now she’s also gone on to that place from whence none return. Grieving and adrift, he goes to Washington, D.C., where he’ll teach a college seminar, "Literature and AIDS."
He rents a room in the large home of a gay man who’s also deep into middle age, and there the novel stops. That’s right. Stops. On page 7. For the narrator finds on his bedside table a book of Mary Todd Lincoln’s letters, and he can’t put it down. Lincoln’s book is a record of unending grief and a chronicle of its devastating effect on her life — what she felt after her husband’s assassination is something like what the narrator is feeling after his mother’s death.
The conversations in "Grief" — mostly between the narrator and his hermit of a landlord — are about grief. Is it useless? (The dead don’t know you’re grieving.) Do you get over it? (Why should you? "It’s the only thing left of that person.") You may think this is morbid stuff, but Holleran is a casual, seductive writer — these conversations seem totally normal. And there’s lots of that humor which, rightly or wrongly, gets a "gay" label: "You don’t know what D.C. was like during the eighties. Funerals, funerals, funerals! I got my suntan one summer from just standing in Rock Creek Cemetery.")
The narrator takes long walks and describes them. He offers a blow-by-blow account of Mary Lincoln’s travails. He attends concerts at museums. He has dinner with the mother of one of his dead friends. His landlord urges him to buy a house in Washington, to rejoin humanity just that much. The college term ends. He goes back to Florida.
The last sentence of the book is a shocker. It’s completely correct — everything in the book points to it — but it’s exactly what, in spite of everything, you don’t believe is coming. But then, most of the book has that quality of surprise: You’re reading about a guy who’s frozen in grief, whose life is behind him, whose best friends are long gone. There’s everything conventional about the way the story is told and nothing conventional about the story itself. And yet you keep trying to make it make sense, as if the narrator is a guest on "Will & Grace."
"Grief," five years in the writing, is just 150 pages long. That’s not a novel, it’s a situation. And yet the main character, in trying to erase himself, is unforgettable. The questions the book asks will nag at you for a long time. And so, although you can’t quite figure out why, you’ll push "Grief" on older friends. Because there’s just no way around it — Andrew Holleran is one of America’s smartest and most accomplished writers.
To buy "Grief" from Amazon.com, click here.
To buy "Dancer from the Dance" from Amazon.com, click here.
